Understanding and Managing Change

Randy Kratz, from SYMMETRY, gave a very useful presentation on "Understanding and Managing Change." Randy's spoken at WAAL conferences before and has some good things to say about dealing with change in a healthy way.

Randy started by asking us to write our names as many times as we could in one minute. We could do 15-20. Then he asked us to do the same thing with the opposite hand. We could do 3-9. The lesson: change causes an inevitable drop in productivity and one of our jobs is to manage that.

He also showed (briefly) a list of terms having to do with sleep and asked us to reconstruct the list. The word "sleep" wasn't on the list but many of us thought it was -- or we "remembered" terms that were related but not on the list. The lesson: rapid change, too much info leads to "making stuff up" -- rumors and gossip.

Some points:

Change won't stop; it only goes faster

People deal with change in many different ways: at different rates and with varying degrees of success

Communication is key

Take care of yourself